


You Have a Hollowed-Out Heart

by LadyOfTheOldWorld



Category: Bishoujo Senshi Sailor Moon | Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
Genre: Brief Homelessness, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Nonbinary Character, Nonbinary Tenoh Haruka, Original Character Death(s), Original Character(s), Other, POV Second Person, Self-Hatred, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-08
Updated: 2019-02-08
Packaged: 2019-10-24 16:21:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,645
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17707619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyOfTheOldWorld/pseuds/LadyOfTheOldWorld
Summary: And it's heavy in your chest. -- Tenoh Haruka's story, from the beginning to the rise of Crystal Tokyo.





	You Have a Hollowed-Out Heart

**Author's Note:**

> Comments (constructive criticism, kind words, etc.) and kudos are always loved and appreciated.

Childhood isn’t something that you talk about often; at least, not your own. It wasn’t a time that you care to remember, and if you must, you do so with great reluctance. You were born to a middle-class family, but neither your parents nor yourself ever follow any sort of convention, no matter how much your mother tried to keep up that pretense. Your mother was a tall, frail woman who had come from Germany for university, met your father, and then never left. (You look like Anneliese, though your coloring has always been darker, your features sharper.) Your father was hardly ever home, and didn’t speak or seem to care much when he was. (You inherited Takeshi’s personality, though you turned reserve into distance, coolness into ice, and apathetic disregard into what some would call misanthropy.) Neither of them really bothered to raise you; your mother is ill and bedridden by the time you are seven, and your father is something of a non-presence in your life.

While home is cold, school is little better. You are the strange, quiet girl (and oh how you hate that word, even then) that is too smart for their own good and almost never speaks. You are the one that does their homework during recess, always the first to arrive in the morning and the first to leave in the afternoon. One day, a few months before your mother passes away, you come home to find your father there. You are eight, bruised from the boys in your class deciding to gang up on you for whatever reason, and can’t remember the last time your father was home for longer than a short time in the wee hours of the morning. You set out your homework on the kitchen table, and your father watches you expressionlessly as he makes himself something to eat. A raised eyebrow silently questions the bruises, and you explain what happened. Your father leaves soon after that, not a word spoken to you, and you begin taking mixed martial-arts the next day.

It is late December, a month before your ninth birthday, when your mother dies. Snow lays thick on the ground, and it’s deathly cold; the funeral is eerily silent. Your mother didn’t have many friends, and few of the ones she did were even there. You suppose you have grandparents, but you have never met any of them. Your mother's parents certainly aren't there. Your father isn't there, either, but what else did you expect? He was hardly there while your mother was still alive, so why would he be there when she dies. It further drives home a point your father once made to you, when he was still acknowledging your existence. Emotions – bonds and ties with others – are only weaknesses, and weaknesses will get you killed. You never stopped to wonder why he felt the need to impress this upon you; you never really cared to know. It was what had kept him alive, in his line of work, and you had never had a positive example of an emotional connection or bond to use as a counter argument.

Four years later, the time in between spent numbly going through the motions, you learn what your father does for a living. You can’t say you’re surprised to learn he’s a mercenary, honestly. It makes too much sense, answering questions you didn’t know how to ask about where he went when he was gone, and why he was so often away. In the meantime, you’ve learned how to take care of yourself better. There are small cuts and burn scars on your hands, from teaching yourself how to cook so you wouldn’t starve. You have grown in height, knowledge, and physical prowess, all so that you would better be able to survive alone in the world. You are the most self-sufficient thirteen-year-old you know, but it never bothers you. It was how you were raised to be, after all, if what your parents did could have been considered raising you in the first place. You have never learned any other way to be, and though you do not yet know it, it will come to serve you well.

You are fifteen, when the static pace of your life changes for the first time. You apply a for a job with a local mechanic because you've always loved cars, and working with your hands is always something you've always been good at. Fifteen is when you decide that you’re finished mourning for a woman that never loved you, and you cut off your previously waist-length braid. Once the hair is gone, you feel lighter, and not just in the physical sense, but the changes aren’t finished yet; Fate has yet to truly have her way with you. The same year, though in summer rather than in spring, you feel the obligation to come out to your father, despite the fact that he has never shown any interest in your life before. Part of you expects a fight, but the rest of you isn't surprised when you're told point-blank to get out. An hour later, you leave with a duffel bag of clothes and anything else you felt like keeping, which was nothing. You never look back.

You spend the rest of the summer and most of the fall bouncing between school, work, sports, and whatever safe place you can find to crash for the night. Along with saving your pay, you become a rather accomplished thief during your time without a place to call home. (Truthfully, you never had a place like that.) The beginning of your nightmares coincides with having enough money to rent a studio apartment. You blame the stress, and focus on getting a stable life together. School is the same as always, only now people give you strange looks because you wear a boys’ uniform. They don’t need to know that you’re so much more comfortable like this, than you ever were in the skirt and blouse. Sports, work, and studying go from ways to pass the time to ways to run. Ways to keep at bay what your heart knows is your destiny, but that your head won’t accept as anything more than some stupid fantasy concocted by your stressed body.

Then, you meet _her_. Kaioh Michiru is her name in this life, though both your heart and the memories you refuse to admit you have whisper that she is _Neptune_. That she is the sea to your sky. That she is the other half of our soul. That she is the home you’ve been silently yearning for since you were five years old, listening to your father scream at your mother for reasons you pretend you don’t want to know. Your heart and soul ache for her, long for her, but your mind refuses her. She may be pretty and captivating and perfect, but she doesn’t know you. She doesn’t know what you’ve lived through. She doesn’t know how hard you’ve worked to scrape together a life something resembling normal. And she wants to take all of that away from you. She wants to make you into something other than yourself. She wants to change you from Haruka (cold, distant, sometimes almost cruel) into Uranus (a leader, a warrior, a protector, a lover).

You’ve never accepted change in your life easily, and outright fought anyone who ever dared to try and change you. But, somehow, with Michiru you can only fight for so long. Seeing her one moment a cold soldier, perfectly willing to stain her hands with blood for the sake of the world, and the next a woman that cares all too much when she saves you from being attacked… Something inside of you changes that day, that very moment. You don't know if you can, or even want to be, the person she wants, but you will try. Because no-one else has ever risked themselves for you. No-one else has ever cared about you with such fierceness, such determination as Michiru seems to. For that matter, no-one before Michiru has ever cared about you _at all_ , whether you lived or died of no consequence to anyone but you yourself. And if to keep that in your life you must accept a mission, shoulder a burden, do things for the greater good rather than for your own good, then so be it.

You become a soldier easily enough. Leading comes almost as quickly, like getting back on a bike after a long time away, or speaking a language that you learned as a child and then didn’t use as a teenager. Becoming a protector, however, is harder. You aren’t used to looking out for anyone but yourself, after all. Living with someone else, living _for_ someone else, is an entirely new concept for you. (Living with your parents was nothing like this, though granted your mother was bedridden by the time you were aware what it meant to live with someone, and your father… well. The less said about _that_ , the better.) Adjusting to Michiru’s patterns and tastes and expectations is easier than you expected, but harder than you had hoped. That’s something else you don’t really know how to do, to hope. It’s never been an issue in your life, after all. Everything was cold and logical; something either was going to happen, or it wasn’t. Hope implied uncertainty, and even during your stint on the streets, you always knew what was going to happen.

Once you and Michiru settle into a routine, time moves much like liquid. In almost the blink of an eye, two years of fighting, searching, and moving from city to city have passed. By the time you and Michiru return to Tokyo, you can read each other without words, are so attuned to each other that you fight and live in perfect synchronicity. And yet, you aren’t nearly as close as people seem to think. You share a life, a mission, a place to call home, but you sleep in separate bedrooms. This is for the sake of the mission, and you refuse to allow yourself to completely fall for her. Being distracted from your duty, even for a moment, would mean the end and you know it. Or, at least, you tell yourself you know that. You refuse to admit that your heart and soul still crave your partner, that you still wake from dreams about millennia past, where Uranus and Neptune were so much _more_ than simply sisters-in-arms.

Then you meet your Princess, and everything changes again. You do everything you can to push her away, just as you did with Michiru in the beginning. The Princess with hair like the sun and eyes like the sky is soft and weak, able to preach about goodness and fairness and love all encompassing. But you, oh, you are a soldier, a warrior; you still remember what it was like to be all but exiled to the depths of space. Constantly on guard, never allowed any contact with your fellow warriors aside from Neptune. (Sometimes, you thought that was all that you needed, but there was always still the emptiness inside of you.) And then, suddenly, you don’t just have five _little girls_ to contend with – ones that have never known war or hardship or pain or emptiness – but a Messiah of Silence that is _just another little girl_. But you are a soldier, and it is all too easy to lose yourself in the persona of Uranus, especially when now only one death will be needed to save the rest of humanity.

Nothing that the Princess preaches should work. Nothing that she stands for should be what triumphs, and yet somehow it is. Somehow, not only do they save the world, but little Hotaru is reborn as well. Things become much less complicated, after that, but the calm, the lull, doesn’t even last a year. You are twenty when you return to Tokyo once more, once again ready for a fight. This time, the entire Court is assembled, and that includes Saturn. Little Hotaru becomes your ward, your child, and as much as you try to keep her at bay, the tiny girl quickly wins you over. In some secret part of you, some corner of your heart, you’ve already fallen for the girl that calls you _Haruka-papa_ and looks to you when monsters threaten, no matter how imagined or unreal. When you finally acknowledge this, you swear to yourself that this will be different. You won’t hold anything back, not like you tried to do with Michiru, Usagi, and even Setsuna at first. You will give this child everything you have – everything you never got.

Fighting Galaxia is nothing like you ever imagined it would be. For one, you’re fighting on two fronts, even if the Princess quite disagrees. The Starlights aren’t to be trusted, no matter how much that hurts Usagi. They are all but foreign invaders, and you know how that sort are dealt with. And yet, in the end, they become useful all the same. With the Inner Senshi dead, their starseeds taken, only the three haggard invaders are left to defend Usagi. You can’t help but blame yourself for all of this. After all, you and Neptune are the first line of defense, those who repel attacks and incursions from outside the Sol System, and yet… you _failed_. You failed with the Death Busters, and you failed again with the woman who calls herself the Golden Queen. That failure leaves a bitter taste in your mouth, and makes you far more resolute. This must end, here and now, no matter the cost. Fate, however, has other plans.

Your plan, your oh-so-desperate gamble, fails. You wonder why this surprises you. After all, isn’t that the only thing you’ve been able to do, recently – _fail_? You told Neptune you would see her in Hell, but you wish you had never said it. You deserve eternal damnation (your mother’s Catholicism bled onto you as child, and never quite went away), but Michiru never did. It was why you were always the one to make the first strike, or to make the call that would be the end. She is too kind, despite being a soldier, and you… you have always been too hard, too cold, too cruel. Too much a sharper version of your mother, too much a more intense version of your father. At that moment, you consider yourself a monster. After all, what else to children raised by misfortune become? Yet, somehow – you should stop being surprised by now – your Princess succeeds. Galaxia is cleansed, everyone is revived, and the world is healed.

Usagi may forgive you, but you can’t forgive yourself. Even six years later, when the curtain is drawn over the world to initiate the coming of Crystal Tokyo, you still haven’t forgiven yourself. In the rubble of what was once Tokyo, in the ash that will birth Neo-Queen Serenity, your doubts and self-hate still fester within you. When your final enemy comes, intent upon snuffing out the pure silver light as so many before had been, your path is clear. Neptune will survive; she always had more conviction than you did. Pluto will survive; she is eternal, and always had clearer sight than you did. Saturn will survive; she was always more a part of the family that the Inner Senshi created than you ever were. The Inners have always had each other, and the rest of your team were always more at home with the younger girls than you were. Usagi – no. _Serenity_ will survive, even if only because when the enemy aims for her, you refuse to allow the attack to connect.

You welcome death; you’ve died three times before, so why should this be any different?


End file.
